|
|
Executive Times |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
2008 Book Reviews |
|||
|
|
The
Gathering by Anne Enright |
|||
|
Rating: |
**** |
|||
|
|
(Highly Recommended) |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
Click
on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
Falling Sure
and why wouldn’t a death bring up all kinds of issues in a large Irish
family? Anne Enright’s fine new novel, The
Gathering, presents a narrator, Veronica Hegarty, a middle child of a
family of nine, who goes to London to bring home to Ireland the body of her
older brother, Liam, who has died tragically. Through this narration, Enright gets to
explore family, life, death, sorrow, memory, and special Irish treats: drink
and England. Along the way, readers enjoy fine writing, as in this excerpt, from
the beginning of Chapter 3, pp. 13-14: The
seeds of my brother's death were sown many years ago.
The person who planted them is long dead — at least that's what I think. So
if I want to tell Liam's story, then I have to start long before he was born.
And, in fact, this is the tale that I would love to write: history is such a
romantic place, with its jarveys and urchins and side-buttoned boots. If it
would just stay still, I think, and settle down. If it would just stop
sliding around in my head. All
right. Lambert
Nugent first saw my grandmother Ada Merriman in a hotel foyer in 1925. This is the moment I choose. It
was seven o'clock in the evening. She was nineteen, he was twenty-three. She
walked into the foyer and did not look about her and sat in an oval-backed
chair near the door. Lamb Nugent watched her through a rush of arrivals and
instructions as she removed her left-hand glove and then picked off the
right. She pulled a little bracelet out from
under her sleeve, and the hand that held the gloves settled in her
lap. She
was beautiful, of course. It
is hard to say what Lamb Nugent looked like, at twenty-three. He has been in
the grave so long, it is hard to think of him innocent or sweating, when all
of that is gone to dust. What
did she see in him? He
must be reassembled; click clack; his muscles hooked to bone and wrapped with
fat, the whole skinned over and dressed in a suit of navy or brown —
something about the cut of the lapels, maybe, that is a little too sharp, and
the smell on his hands would be already a little finer than carbolic. He had
it down, even then, the dour narcissism of the ordinary man, and all his acts
of self-love were both subtle and exact. He did not preen. Lamb Nugent watched.
Or he did not watch so much as let it enter into him — the world, in all its
nuance of who owed what to whom. Which
is what he saw, presumably, when my grandmother walked in through the door. His baby eyes. His two black pupils,
into which the double image of Ada Merriman walked, and sat. She was wearing
blue, or so I imagine it. Her blue self settled in the grey folds of his
brain, and it stayed there for the rest of his life. It
was five past seven. The talk in the foyer was of rain, and what to do with
the jarvey and whether refreshments would be required; after which the knot
of arrivals was pulled in a string through the front lounge door, and the two
servants were left behind to wait; she in her neat chair, he with his elbow
on the high reception desk, like a man standing at a bar. In
which position, they stayed for three and a half hours. They belonged to the
lower orders. Waiting was not a problem, for them. The
image I kept getting through The
Gathering was one of falling. In some families, that’s the normal state
of affairs. Read and enjoy. Steve
Hopkins, April 21, 2008 |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
Go to Executive Times Archives |
||||
|
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the May 2008 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The Gathering.htm For Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|||
